On the afternoon of December 10, 1984, a whistling sound and a boom were heard by several neighbors near the rural Georgia town of Claxton. The sound was a grapefruit-sized stone meteorite striking and destroying the mailbox of a resident. To this day, it remains the only meteorite ever recovered from the fall and very little made it to the collector market. It was later classified as a L6 chondrite and this specimen originates from that hammer stone.
Your specimen comes inside a 4 x 3 (inches) display box with glass lid. The display contains a photo of the mailbox the meteorite destroyed. When you consider how small a mailbox is, the odds that a meteorite would strike one are incredibly small and will likely never happen again.
In this years since this fall, Claxton has become increasingly rare. You just don't see it on the collector market very often.
The specimen offered here is a professionally-prepared, thin, part-slice with a lot of surface area for the weight. It weighs .135g (135mg) and comes in an acrylic display box with label.
FALL OF THE CLAXTON, USA, STONY METEORITE
Name: CLAXTON
Place of fall: About 10 km SE. of Claxton, Evans County, Georgia, USA.
32°6'9'N., 81°52'22"W.
Date of fall: December 10, 1984, 1730 hrs.
Class and type: Stone. Olivine-hypersthene chondrite (L6). Olivine Fa25.4.
Number of individual
specimens: 1 recovered, possibly others fell.
Total weight: 1455 g
Circumstances of fall: A grapefruit sized stone, completely covered with thin black fusion crust, fell damaging a metal mail box and making a depression less than 30 cm in diameter in loose dirt. Two persons standing 36 m from where it landed and two others inside a mobile home about 20 m away reported a whistling sound followed by crash and a thud as the stone fell.
Source: SEAN Bulletin, 1984, 9, no. 11; H. Povenmire, Florida Fireball Patrol, 215 Osage Drive, Indian Harbour Beach, Florida 32937, USA.
